Bill Frezza is a 35-year veteran of the technology industry. After graduating from MIT with degrees in both science and engineering, Bill spent his early years at Bell Laboratories. Since then, he has worked as a product manager, salesman, marketer, entrepreneur, consultant, technology evangelist, and venture capitalist. Bill holds seven patents and has been investing in early-stage tech startups for the last 17 years as a partner in a venture capital firm. Since 2008, he has been writing weekly opinion columns for publications such as RealClearMarkets.com, Forbes.com, the Huffington Post and Bio-IT World and appeared regularly on TV and radio outlets, including CNBC, Fox Business and WBAL. In 2011, he was a finalist for the Hoiles Prize for excellence in American journalism and in October 2013, he became the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s 2013-2014 Warren T. Brookes Journalism Fellow. In January 2014, Bill began hosting RealClear Radio Hour airing Saturdays on Boston’s WXKS 1200AM & WJMN 94.5FM-HD2.

Give Greece What It Deserves: Communism

Once in a great while an opportunity comes along to deliver justice to a people, giving them what they truly deserve. Greece’s time has come.

It must be dawning on all but the most obtuse member of the banking elite that they can’t possibly steal enough money from German taxpayers to save the Greek government from default. Put it off, maybe, but collapse is inevitable.

Once this happens, what is the purpose of casting Greece into some selective temporary financial purgatory where the irrelevant Greek economy can continue embarrassing anyone foolish enough to lend their dysfunctional government a dime? Why not go all the way and give the country what many of its people have been violently demanding for almost a century?

Let them have Communism.

Hard as it is for young people to believe, Communism was once a major historical force holding billions of people in thrall. Outside the halls of elite universities, who still takes it seriously? Sure we have Cuba, where the Castro deathwatch is the last thing standing between that benighted penal colony and an inevitable makeover by Club Med. Then there is Venezuela, though hope is fading that Hugo Chavez will carry the Bolivarian banner much longer now that he’s busy sucking down FOLFOX cocktails while checking for signs that his hair is falling out. And frankly, a psychopathic family dynasty ruling a nation of stunted zombies hardly makes North Korea a proper Communist exemplar.

What the world needs, lest we forget, is a contemporary example of Communism in action. What better candidate than Greece? They’ve been pining for it for years, exhibiting a level of anti-capitalist vitriol unmatched in any developed country. They are temperamentally attuned to it, having driven all hard working Greeks abroad in search of opportunity. They pose no military threat to their neighbors, unless you quake at the sight of soldiers marching around in white skirts. And they have all the trappings of a modern Western nation, making them an uncompromised test bed for Marxist theories. Just toss them out of the European Union, cut off the flow of free Euros, and hand them back the printing plates for their old drachmas. Then stand back for a generation and watch.

The land that invented democracy used it to perfect the art of living at the expense of others, an example all Western democracies appear intent on emulating. Being the first to run out of other people’s money makes Greece truly ripe to take the next logical step beyond socialism.

As wrenching as it will be we can take comfort in the fact that Greece doesn’t have much of an economy to disrupt. The only Greek industry that’s worth a damn is tourism, rapidly collapsing as travelers get tired of being stranded by strikes while dodging Molotov cocktails. The rest of us can find plenty of other sources of lamb chops, yogurt, and olive oil. They crushed the concept of private property long ago under the burden of environmental, cultural, and social regulations that govern land use. Wouldn’t it be instructive to let them have a go at building a workers’ paradise to remind us what state enforced equality looks like?

Unlike neighboring Balkan nations that got to experience the joys of Communism after the Second World War, Greece was brought back from the brink by massive western intervention as well as a Churchillian side deal that obliged Stalin to butt out. The nasty civil war between the Greek Communist Party (the KKE) and government forces backed by Britain and the U.S. set the stage for decades of struggle between communist sympathizers who never gave up the dream, and right wing juntas determined to rule by force. The uneasy peace that has existed since the colonels were booted merely masks underlying tensions as every Greek worries, is someone else working fewer hours than I am?

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I just stumbled upon this article. I read it with great humor and enthusiasm. That is, I cannot agree with your view enough, Mr. Frezza. I love your wit and bluntness in this article. It is very resfreshing and it would be very nice if the EU power mongers would just say to Greece get the hell out you’re on your own now. My personal view is the the EU power mongers want to keep control of the Greeks, allowing them to wallow in their squalor to the detriment of themselves, and possibly also the EU itself.

Bill, on my view, I´m sure about this. Both PSEUDO-DEMOCRACY based on Wild Capitalism or COMUNISM will continue and in a very fast way destroying Greece if these same corrupt leaders stay with the Control of this country…but on the other hand Germany and European Union are responsible for this!!! So let they PAY to Greece what is in the negotiation, even we may know the money is reaching the wrong people. Unfortunately this European Union as it is assembled is going to fascism and neo-nazism as stated by Mr. Nigel Farage. I recommend you Bill to see this movie to understand what´s going on E.U.: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sSDQe3kMkXQ

Take heart, Mr. Frezza. There is still a noble Greece, living among the expatriates. It is carried by those who had the wit and energy to emigrate in the early 20th century. What’s left in the Peloponnesus now is a worthless husk.

So you’re a “noble greek” because you don’t live in Greece? I moved to Greece after living in the US for 40 years. I used to share your opinion. How ignorant I was.

What I have witnessed in Greece with the elections is called democracy. I may not like the results, you may not like the results, but it is democracy.

But there is a silver lining. The establishment (the two party system) was dealt a blow. Not many other countries’ electorates can pull that off. They’re too stuck in the two party paradigm that’s really representative of of the same elite power structure.

It’s everywhere, even in the US, and many of the core countries of Europe.

By the way, this crisis is global. It began in Wall Street in 2008, and it still has a lot to go. It’s spreading through out Europe.

If you’re an American as I am, you should be worrying more about the new masters – the Chinese. They’re taking over Latin America, Africa, and soon Australia. And what can the US do? It will continue to run massive debts beholden to China until it can’t. Now that’s a real problem that needs to be addressed.

What Greece is going through is what most Western nations will be going through.

I see the recent elections in Greece have breathed new life into this column as the Greek people stare into the abyss. The many angry comments here by people looking to blame everyone but themselves for their misery is a testament to a culture that has become rotten to the core. Good luck to you all as you try to rediscover the fact that real pride can only come from your own work, not from the legacy of long dead ancestors.

Satire or not, opinion piece or factual, this is a really bad-written piece, for one big reason.

Satires identify themselves as such. To the “untrained eye”, your article is nothing more than a libel, containing bits and pieces of truth with a ton of false “facts”. Unfortunately, this world is full of untrained eyes. As Greeks living abroad, we have been reading about how lazy we are and how we should be punished for what we apparently did for years now. You are just feeding a very bad propaganda monster, that has managed to move Greeks to a sub-human level in the eyes of many foreigners, who now think that the mass-suffering and punishment of a whole country is not only justified, but should be part of any helping hand extended towards Greece, so that an example is made out of us.

You are very wrong in saying that Greeks are not self-critical. All nationalities and ethnic groups have their strong points and their shortcomings and as Greeks, we fully know ours. You do not need to humiliate every single strong point that we have so that you can present our negatives. And yes, right now Greeks are kind of lost in space, a lot of people are living in despair and our young generation has nothing to hope for, something reflected in this bi-polar election results. This whole political mess is history repeating itself, but even as bad as the Greeks are – according to you of course-, communist or not, we will probably restrain ourselves and not wreak havoc, sadistically killing millions around the continent and the globe. If our only crime as a modern nation is that we overspent and we are unorganized, I can live with that – and sleep kind of well at night.

Communism, hah? Oh yes, very spooky indeed. For years they were telling us “the Communists will come to seize yours homes”! Do you think, my dear “recovering venture capitalist”, that for a poor man there’s a difference between losing his home by a communist or a bankster? Don’t make us laugh! Yes, Communists are bad (if you have Stalin in mind), but totally free capitalists are far more worse and corrupted. They need to be strictly controlled by national gvts, but –oh, what a surpise!– that is not possible because they buy off state officials! Let’s not forget that Siemens, Ferrostaal etc. played great role in destroying Southern Europeans’ economies and I won’t even get into the “party” major enterprises had before the Olympic Games of 2004 in Athens!

Pointing out the vices of the greek government is one thing but this article is an insult to the greek society, culture and heritage. You shouldn’t be calling yourself a greek american. You have a very shallow knowledge of modern greek history and you seem to be getting your information from news coverage of demonstrations rather than facts. You say greeks have been pining for communism when for the past 30 years the communist party has not been getting more than 5-7% of the vote.

Greece became a westernized economy and enjoyed comparable living standards with its EU peers. May I remind you that the per capita GDP in Greece is still 26k when Italy has 29k and Portugal 22k.

Greece managed to survive and thrive (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_economic_miracle) in a much more complicated setting than the rest of the civilized world, emerging from a 400-year long Turkish occupation; When Europe was thriving in renaissance, exploring the world and colonizing, our country was battling against losing its culture, language, religion and identity from the Turks.

When the rest of the world was experiencing industrial revolution, Greece was still trying to define its geographical existence with wars which lasted until the first two decades of the 20th century.

Yet, Greece gave the coalition forces their first victory against the Axis as early as 1940, which led Churchill to say its famous (“Today we say that Greeks fight like heroes, from now on we will say that heroes fight like Greeks”). The world owes more to Greece than what Greece owes to Germany and the EU.

I do not know where your bitterness for our magnificent country comes from but I do know it is apparent in every sentence within your article.